Month: February 2003

Joy and Chris have made it to their new Home. We are excited for them as they move into a new home and a less expensive area. As we looked at the pictures on their page, we were more and more excited, and can only imagine how they must feel. Well, they say how they feel on the page, but we still sympathize, and think “Wow, what fun!” We have been in the habit of making drastic life changes, and they have always been good for us. We wish the same for them.

Ethan’s Prayer(thank you that)we can go to Sunday schooland we can go to churchand we can go to the malland we can go to Sunday schooland we can go to churchand we can go to the storeand we can play with toysand we can play with Yana’s toysand we can watch a movie shrekand thank you for everything that you give usand thank you for our foodand we can sing “twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are” like that.and we can sing “everything that, everything that, everything that” like thatand thank you for my familyJesus name Amen

Open Source/FreewareLately I have been browsing through the mature/stable projects on SourceForge. I have found some very interesting projects and many that I would like to try to use hare in Computer Services. I have been interested in moving towards Open Source software because of the burden of cost for non-profit organizations. For example, the tools that corporations use to manage users are priced based on number of users. While a corporation may be considered large if it has 500 + users, a school that has 500+ students is not, but the academic pricing is a discount of 15%. The actual number of employee users is around 100 max, but we pay for 500+ licensing because of the students. Some of the software packages cost us more than $2000 after the academic discount. For a small to medium business that has less than 100 users, it is less than $1000. The question is, when purchasing the product, do we tell them we have less than 100 users, knowing that when they think of users they think of employees, or do we tell them we have 500+ users, and pay the same amount as a large company, even though we are not a large company? I tend to think that you report the truth, even if that means you pay more when you think that you should not. But instead of actually paying out all that money that I think we should not have to pay, I find Open Source projects that do what I need to do, and pay for an Internet connection to download them. So far it has been a gradual roll out of Open Office, and a few tools here and there. Gimp is installed site-wide and blender is making it’s way out. Freeciv is gaining in popularity, and BZFlag just made it’s debut this weekend and was a grand success.